The current hierarchical organization of Numeral as compared to Determiner is problematic:

- Numeral is-a Quantifier (this is correct with respect to the semantic characteristics of Quantifiers and Numerals)
- Quantifier is-a Determiner (this is correct with respect to the *syntactic* characteristics of quantifying determiners)

However, in the following sentences, "three" is hardly a Determiner, but rather, the head of an NP. According to its semantics, however, it is clearly a Numeral:

(1) There were *three* of them.

(2) Wir sind die *drei* von der Tankstelle. (German)
we are the *three* from the gas.station

One may consider to promote Quantifier to a top-level category in order to distangle semantically-determined parts of speech (e.g., quantifier, numeral) from syntactically-determined parts of speech (e.g., determiner).